Blaming the Devil

Or, how in the Mauldin case, there’s actually more than enough blame to go around.

I read this article on the Joshua Mauldin case this morning and was dumbfounded. Not because this stuff doesn’t happen all the time — it does, unfortunately. Not because I didn’t believe any of it could happen — of course it happens, and probably more often than ever comes to light in the news. So what was it that robbed me of words as I contemplated this sorry series of events?

A synopsis, as well as I can put it together from the news report: Joshua Mauldin, an Arkansas native all of 19 years old and mentally ill “gets a call to become a preacher.” Probably lacking in any sort of higher education and spurred on by his mother, it seems, he strikes out to Galveston TX in order to follow what he assumes are God’s orders. His mother, 20 year old wife, and baby daughter accompany him.

The stresses of relocating with a tiny child unravel a rather tenuous grip on reality and the boy puts his baby daughter in a microwave oven for 20 seconds, burning the infant’s face and hand. His wife immediately insists that this mentally ill man was such a threat to “Satan” that the old boy needed to attack Joshua Mauldin through his mental illness to make him commit a heinous crime against his own child.

How many ways are there to be sad by this? Let’s count them.

1. That a child had to suffer injury for her father’s illness.
2. That the child’s mother is so besotted with a man she’ll use any blame construct to protect him from the consequences of his actions.
3. That religions exist to provide blame constructs like “Satan” in the first place.
4. That Joshua Mauldin mistook the symptoms of his mental illness as a call to ministerial service.
5. That religions foster such mistakes to begin with.
6. That his pastor apparently wasn’t smart enough to realize that (using the appropriate symbolism here) God doesn’t call the mentally ill to service!
7. That Eva Mauldin launched a MySpace site to defend her husband’s actions and make requests for help.
8. That MySpace exists to let her do that.
9. That millions of visitors are going to flock to that page on MySpace to gawk at the crazy people.
10. That a significant percentage of those visitors will agree with Eva Mauldin, and send material assistance and prayers to further her cause.
11. That the path of the true mystic has been forever confused with this mentally ill man’s claims of a “call to be a preacher.”
12. That Joshua Mauldin will probably do prison time for this rather than getting the professional help he obviously needs.
13. That his daughter is now going to spend a lot of time “in the system” from the intervention of the Texas Child Protective Services.
14. That children “in the system” are significantly more likely to end up as truant drug-abusers and criminals — which tells us more about “the system” than anyone really wants to have to admit.
15. That if there is a perfection to all this, I’m not yet evolved enough to see it.

If there are silver linings available for this kind of story, perhaps they go something like this:

• Pastors of fundamentalist Protestant churches will begin educating themselves on the difference between mental instability and true mystic phenomena.
• Education fosters new ideas — let one in, and others will follow. Fundamentalists know this, which is why they fight new ideas to figurative and literal death. With the influx of new thoughts about mental illness and its treatments, perhaps these pastors will begin to entertain the idea that the bible was never meant to be taken literally, after all.
• Released from the paradigm of punishment and retribution put forth by the Old Testament, pastors begin speaking about forgiveness and love in their sermons. Congregations begin to understand that actions taken out of illness need treatment, not harsh punitive measures.
• And just maybe, that their gay family member isn’t going to Hell after all, because there really isn’t a hell for them to go to after death…
• Radical new ideas here: Forgiveness? Tolerance? Love? Acceptance? Let’s try practicing Jesus’s real teachings!
• Understanding that God Is One after all, Christian prayer meetings are soon called “Interfaith Contemplative Hours” where members of all religious faiths come together to address the Divine by whichever name they like best.
• Other religions which continue to tolerate fundamantalists in their midsts gradually fade out of human awareness under the steadying influence of love, tolerance, and forgiveness…

Well, I can dream, can’t I?